Kaze View started with a sunburn and a realization. The sunburn happened in the Seto Inland Sea, on a small boat that we'd rented in Onomichi with no real plan except to go south and see what we found. The realization happened three days later, when we were sitting on a quay in a harbor that wasn't in any guidebook, eating fish that had been swimming that morning, and it hit us: we'd been to Japan six times between us, and we'd never really seen the coast.
We'd done Tokyo. We'd done Kyoto. We'd done the temples, the shrines, the Michelin-starred ramen, the bullet trains, the whole checklist. And we'd seen the coast through train windows, flashes of blue between tunnels, brief glimpses before the landscape turned back to houses and rice fields. But we'd never stopped. Never rented a car and followed a road just because it looked like it went near the water. Never set an alarm for 5am to watch boats come in. Never understood that the Japan we thought we knew was missing its edge — literally.
Kaze View is our attempt to fix that, not just for ourselves but for other travelers who look at a map and wonder what happens at the line where the land ends. We cover the coasts of Japan — the Pacific, the Sea of Japan, the Seto Inland Sea, the East China Sea — with a focus on what's real. Real harbors where real fishers work. Real roads that real people drive. Real hot springs where the water comes out of the ground and flows into the ocean. We don't do resorts. We don't do packaged tours. We don't do "hidden gems" because every travel writer has used that phrase into meaninglessness.
The name "Kaze View" comes from kaze, the Japanese word for wind. The wind is the thing that connects all these places — it blows off the sea and shapes the cities, the harbors, the roads, the people. Every coast in Japan has its own wind. The dry yamaji of Kochi. The cold Siberian winds that hit the Sea of Japan in winter. The warm Pacific breezes that make the Izu Peninsula feel like a different country from Tokyo. We're not meteorologists, but we pay attention to the wind because it tells you something about a place that the buildings and the food don't.
What We Do
We visit places. We drive roads. We sit in harbors at dawn and eat fish we can't identify. We soak in hot springs until our fingers wrinkle. We take notes. We go back to places we wrote about to see if they changed. We correct ourselves when we get things wrong. We sell one thing — a downloadable Japan Coastal Drives Map — and everything else is free.
The map is a PDF with all five of our coastal routes marked, along with driving times, toll costs, ferry connections, harbor locations, onsen towns, and our personal notes on where to stop for food, gas, and the occasional emergency bathroom break. It costs $17. That's it. No subscriptions, no premium content, no Patreon, no ads. We make enough from the map to cover our hosting and travel costs, and that's all we're trying to do.
Our editorial method is simple: we only write about places we've been. No aggregation, no rewriting press releases, no "based on reviews." If we say a road is spectacular, we've driven it. If we say a harbor has the best tuna in Japan, we've eaten tuna at that harbor and at enough others to compare. If we say an onsen has a view of the ocean, we've sat in that bath and looked at that view. You can read our full methodology on our method page.
What We Don't Do
We don't book trips. We don't plan itineraries. We don't arrange ferry tickets or car rentals or ryokan reservations. When people email us asking for help planning their Japan trip, we send a polite version of "sorry, we can't help with that." There are travel agents for that. We're writers.
We don't take sponsored trips. No one has paid for us to visit their harbor, stay at their ryokan, or drive their coastal route. When we mention a car rental company (usually Toyota Rent-a-Car), it's because that's where we rented our car. When we mention a ferry, it's because we took it. Affiliate links are clearly marked and only point to services we've actually used.
We don't do social media. No Instagram, no Twitter, no TikTok, no Facebook page. We're old-fashioned enough to believe that if you write something worth reading, people will find it through search, through links, through word of mouth. The internet doesn't need another travel Instagram account.
The People
Dylan Fisher — Founder
Dylan grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a fishing town that ruined him for inland living. He moved to Boston for college, worked as a journalist covering transportation infrastructure (which is more interesting than it sounds), and visited Japan for the first time in 2015. The trip was supposed to be Tokyo and Kyoto. He ended up taking a wrong train and finding himself in Onomichi, where he sat on the quay for three hours doing nothing, and it was the best part of the trip.
He founded Kaze View in 2022 after quitting his journalism job to write about coastal travel full-time. He's sailed the Seto Inland Sea in a small boat (the sunburn trip), driven all five coastal routes on this site at least twice, and holds the team record for earliest harbor arrival (4:15am at Katsuura, because he couldn't sleep). He writes about wind patterns, road conditions, and the specific smell of different harbors. He currently lives in Boston and visits Japan 3-4 times per year.
Aiko Mori — Co-Founder
Aiko grew up in Kochi, on the Pacific coast of Shikoku, in a family that fished for a living. She left for university in Osaka, spent ten years working in marketing, and realized she missed the sound of waves. She moved back to Kochi in 2019, started writing about coastal food culture, and met Dylan at a harbor in Inatori where they were both eating kinmedai at 6am.
Aiko knows every harbor on Shikoku's Pacific coast by name. She can identify fish by the way they're cut, tell you which ryokan has the best bath just by looking at the steam, and navigate the back roads of the Noto Peninsula without GPS. She writes the harbor and onsen content for Kaze View, and she's the reason our food recommendations are accurate. She lives in Kochi City and walks along the Kagami River every morning.
Liam O'Brien — Contributor
Liam is a cyclist who doesn't know when to stop. In 2023 he rode the Shimanami Kaido (the 70-kilometer cycling route across the Seto Inland Sea) and kept going, eventually covering the entire coast of Shikoku and crossing to Kyushu. He writes about cycling routes, ferry connections for bikes, and the specific challenges of coastal travel on two wheels. He's the reason we include bicycle-specific notes in our coastal drive guides.
Liam lives in Dublin and visits Japan once a year for a month-long cycling trip. His current project is riding every coastal road on the Sea of Japan side of Honshu. He's about halfway done. He posts his ride reports on Kaze View and nowhere else.
Our Philosophy
We believe travel writing should be honest. That means saying when a place is disappointing, when a road is overrated, when a harbor smells bad (some of them do). It means admitting when we got something wrong and fixing it. It means no clickbait headlines, no "you won't believe what happened next," no listicles that pad the count to hit a round number.
We believe the best travel experiences require effort. The 5am alarm. The rental car with the GPS in Japanese. The ryokan where no one speaks English and you communicate by pointing and bowing. The harbor where you eat something you can't identify and it's the best thing you've ever tasted. These things don't happen on package tours. They happen when you're slightly uncomfortable, slightly lost, and paying attention.
We believe the coast matters. In a world of cities, airports, and high-speed trains, the coastline is where things slow down. The ferry that leaves when it's full, not when the schedule says. The fishing village where the restaurant closes at 2pm because the lunch crowd is gone. The hot spring where the only sound is waves. These places remind you that time isn't uniform, that convenience isn't the highest value, and that the edge of the land has something to teach you.
If that sounds like your kind of travel, you're in the right place. Start with our coastal drives, or our fishing harbors, or just pick a place on the map that looks interesting and go. The coast is waiting.
Kaze View Media
Founded: 2022
Based: Boston, MA & Kochi, Japan
Team: 3 writers, 0 interns
Revenue: Map sales only
Social media: None
Sponsored content: Never